Now, with about six weeks to go before publication, Mr. Murdoch has raised objections with Mr. Wolff and his publisher about portions of the book, titled The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, that suggest that Mr. Murdoch is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares "the general liberal apoplexy," as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant.

In early October Mr. Murdoch obtained an early draft of the book, despite a tight embargo on the manuscript, and has raised objections with Doubleday, a division of Random House, about what he said were inaccuracies in the way Mr. Wolff describes relations between Mr. Murdoch and two of his top executives - Mr. Ailes and Peter Chernin, the president of News Corporation.

"I'm obviously annoyed that they're looking at an early version of the book, and a purloined one at that," Mr. Wolff said in an interview. "In essence News Corp. is holding stolen goods."

"She wasn't for us," the News Corp. chairman said of Regan, who was ousted in December after an uproar over her plans to publish a book by O.J. Simpson and a novel about Mickey Mantle that Murdoch called a "pseudo, pornographic thing." Interviewed at "Media Summit New York," held at McGraw-Hill's headquarters, Murdoch recalled that he signed off on Regan's Simpson project, as long as payment would go only to the ex-jock's kids.

"I said [to Regan], 'If it really reads like a confession, he gets no money,'" Murdoch said. "It's my fault. I should have been closer to it." But Murdoch said he rarely spoke to Regan and lost touch with the project. In November, company executives reached him - at his ranch in Australia - and told him of the public outcry. He said he backed their plan to scuttle the book, noting what he called a "clever working up of public opinion by the families" of victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

"It was a mistake," Murdoch said of the $1.1 million book-and-TV deal, from which Simpson was reportedly paid. But the Simpson fiasco was no reason to fire Regan, Murdoch said, because he had given the green light early on. However, when her plans to publish the Mantle novel came to light, as Murdoch put it, "I thought, oh God, we don't want to go through this again. Just cancel that book."

In December, News Corp. said Regan was fired after she allegedly launched an anti-Semitic tirade at a company lawyer. Her lawyer has since threatened to sue News Corp. for libel and wrongful termination. He could not be reached yesterday. Murdoch said Regan, who was hired in 1994, turned out to be "not a team player, and that's putting it mildly. ... She wasn't for us."